Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems

Between the National and the Global

Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Lenz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138903487
• eBook ISBN: 9781317448167
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

As contemporary education becomes increasingly tied to global economic power, national school systems attempting to influence one another inevitably confront significant tensions caused by differences in heritage, politics, and formal structures. Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of the reform movements that seek to homogenize schooling around the world. Informed by historical and sociological insight into a variety of nations and eras, these in-depth case studies reveal how and why sweeping, convergent reform agendas clash with specific institutional policies, practices, and curricula. Countering current theoretical models which fail to address the potential pressures born from these challenging isomorphic developments, this book illuminates the cultural idiosyncrasies that both produce and problematize global reform efforts and offers a new way of understanding curriculum as a manifestation of national identity.

Part I
The Global and the Local in the History of Education

1
Between the National and the Global

Introduction

Daniel Tröhler and Thomas Lenz

Today’s educational questions in both research and policy are discussed with regard to international or even global levels. While national educational policies are trying to adapt their educational systems to internationally accepted standards, research is trying to analyze these processes, to identify their historical roots, and to evaluate their desirability, impacts, and effects. However, although devoted to analyzing these developments, some of the research does more than analyze them—namely, it constructs them.

One of the most prominent attempts to construct rather than analyze these outlined developments is a model of institutional change developed at the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. The model has triggered an international research agenda called neo-institutionalism, which focuses on organizations in their cultural environment. In its first stage the model developed the notion of “loose coupling,” describing the relationship between formal structures of organizations and their inner activities (Glassmann, 1973; Weick, 1976). The loose coupling model argues that the formal structures are not tightly linked to the inner practices within organizations and that the rules of the organizational game might be very different from the way the game is actually played. The inner activities are believed to have their own logic in terms of effectiveness and efficiency (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, pp. 341ff., p. 361; see also Meyer & Rowan, 1978, pp. 79ff.). Historical case studies in education endorse the idea that the phenomenon of loose coupling is not only not a disturbing factor but, quite on the contrary, a constitutive factor for an educational organization. Indeed, attempts to tightly connect formal structures and inner activities can lead to an annulment of the organization (Bosche, 2008). External expectations are mirrored in the adaptions of organizational structures and the definition of procedures of organizations (such as schools), whereas the inner activities (such as teaching) are hardly affected by organizational strategies—much to the chagrin of educational reformers. Whereas the outer shell of an organization and its rules and regulations can be revised rather quickly, its inner activities (the way the organization really does things) might not be very susceptible to change even in the long run.

The “world polity” thesis of neo-institutionalism assumes that there is something like a world society that leads to a global trend in the adaption of formal structures, which tend to be more or less the same in every (developed) nation-state (see, for instance, Meyer & Ramirez, 2000). According to this world polity thesis, (allegedly) successful models of organizing schooling are being globally disseminated. This dissemination works either through large international meetings and reports, such as the UNESCO Education for All conferences or the UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report, or through the guidelines and conditions of the World Bank. Through these channels, the world polity thesis argues, specific models of organizing schooling become globally implemented, leading to a global isomorphism of schooling. UNESCO or the World Bank may be seen as contributing to the formal isomorphism of the educational systems throughout the world, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) may be identified as a player in harmonization on a more European scale.

The world polity thesis (at least on the naive reading) suggests that schools all over the world are in fact more or less the same. Accordingly, it is suggested that owing to specific “world forces,” that is, some “cultural principles exogenous to any specific nation-state and its historical legacy” (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000, p. 115), the developments of schooling and curricula in the different nation-states “show surprising degrees of homogeneity around the world” (Meyer, 1992, pp. 2f.) and “variance across national societies is less noticeable than most arguments would have had it,” so that we may speak of a “world curriculum” in the “global village,” indicating the “relative unimportance of the national, so far as mass curricular outlines go” (pp. 6f.).

It is probably no coincidence that the idea of a “world society” steered by a regime called “world polity” has been suggested by sociologists (see also Luhmann, 1975; Beck, 1998; Castells, 2003). Sociology depends in its fundaments on the perception of a society, and society has been, from its very outset, a national construction, eventually becoming the epitome of the emerging nation-states, restricted to the respective nation-states and distinct from the “societies” of other nation-states. Against this background, it is understandable that in post-national times sociologists, realizing the slow eclipse of their object—society—would move to the next clustered “social” entity in a post-national era, the global “world society.” What has been “true” in the nation-states—national society, education, policy, and politics—now applies to the world as a whole—world society, world curriculum, and world polity.

Notwithstanding the indisputable merits of the early neo-institutionalism, this book challenges the idea of transferring developments observed within the nation-states to a world-state. The book does not aim to challenge the fact that on an abstract level there are many formal similarities between different school systems that can be detected, but it does challenge the proposition that these similarities are still really similar on a less abstract level, on a level where different cultural systems of meaning “make” something else of something “similar.” Rather than contributing to an intellectual globalizing of globalization (Tröhler, 2009), the book asks analytically how global or transnational pressures are translated into regional or national idiosyncrasies—or it asks how the model of “loose coupling” works on a regional or national level when it comes to global pressures.

The question of how a specific school organization (as an institutional heritage of an idiosyncratic culture) performs within the tensions between global agendas and national culture is hardly addressed by the dominant models and theories analyzing educational questions at an international level. It is here that this book sets in. It acknowledges that today’s educational questions tend to be discussed more and more at international and global levels and that different national school systems are in fact more or less simultaneously adjusting to each other in more formal settings: It seems that the educational globe is harmonizing itself on both levels, the rhetorical and the organizational. Yet the attraction of this global formal affinity has led to a neglect of questions on how this harmonization process came about in different nation-states, how it interacted with national and/or cultural idiosyncrasies of national school systems, and to what extent rhetorical and formal organizational harmony actually erased national and/or cultural systems of reasoning and creating meaning (Tröhler, 2010).

The attractiveness of the perception of a harmonization of the educational globe might lie in its surprising stances, for modern mass schooling was undoubtedly established to help young states integrate their inhabitants into their respective nations. This integration has had two somewhat different aspects. One was to explain to inhabitants of different regions that they are now, and even foremost, citizens of a much bigger entity than the region and that they had to identify themselves with this whole, the state. The other aspect indicated the need to convince people who had been told they were free by nature to identify themselves with the new nation-state: Although it had been comparatively easy to unite people against a regime that was understood as unjust—the British and the French monarchies in the context of the American and French Revolutions—declaring all people free by nature (and that is by principle) made it of course much more difficult to make them into loyal or good citizens of the new constitutional state. It had been intellectuals who proclaimed people as being free by nature based on theories of natural rights, and it was again intellectuals who somehow reunited the people as citizens in the imagined community (Anderson, 1983) of the nation by uniting the ideas of the nation and the constitutional state, proclaiming the respective ideals of the social order and the visions of the good citizen, whereby these later served as a basis for the erection of the mass school system with its curricula through which these citizens actually had to be made (Tröhler, in press).

Whereas the transnationally shared belief was that citizens were not simply there but had to be “made,” different nation-states developed distinct education systems and curricula through which this envisaged citizen was to be constructed (Tröhler, Popkewitz, & Labaree, 2011). Education policy and curricular developments were thus deeply shaped by traditional political entities and specific geographic and cultural path dependencies, even though transnational glances across the borders might have been much more common than the national(ist) rhetoric makes us believe.

The national framing of different educational systems is hardly questionable. However, as opposed to the political rhetoric largely stuck in national aspirations, there is little doubt that at least since the end of the Second World War, education policy and curricular developments have been determined fundamentally by international trends, supranational influences, and demands for global progress; the educational (or better: curricular) reform movement after Sputnik in 1957 is just a particularly striking example of the global harmonization of education. Within this framework, enabled by organizations like the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC)/OECD, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, the World Bank, and others, an international network of experts emerged—especially in the 1960s—that started to exert strong pressure on national and regional organizations (Tröhler, 2014). Domestic developments in education became more subject to influences from abroad. For instance, in 1972 UNESCO published a new report on education that argued enthusiastically that nations should tie their education policies closer to their entire state structures, social policy in particular. At a European level, the effort was to increase cooperation and mutual understanding and, thereby, mutual adaptation. Increased cross-national comparisons of very different education systems became popular in the press, too (UNESCO, 1972).

This dynamic internationalization of education should not be underestimated. At a formal level there were increasing dialogues between many European countries, such as the famous Royaumont seminar, held from November 23 to December 4, 1959, setting the agenda for New Mathematics in Europe. It was organized by the OEEC at the request of the United States (OECD, 1961; Bjarnadóttir, 2008; Rohstock, 2014). Organizations became active at supranational levels. Tight personal networks were created, linking the national and international and vice versa. Institutional channels were established for the transfer of ideas, policies, and curricula. These mutual adaptations between the systems led to a trend towards isomorphism, suggesting a teleology towards a unified and standardized (world) education system and curriculum. The result was an obvious gap between the political rhetoric in favor of this unified and standardized teleological process, on the one hand, and public discourses resulting from the distinct national agendas of education policy, on the other. It is this very gap that lies at the center of this book.

The general theoretical hypothesis linking the different chapters of this book is that when educational policy successfully transfers models from one system to another—that is, when one specific national policy or an amalgam of policies becomes global in its aspirations and is supported by supranational organizations—it will exert pressure on other national systems. This pressure will first lead to tension within local or national cultures that are expressed in the respective formal structures, the systems of governance, and the curricula. What exactly happens through this tension is culturally different, and what may look isomorphic at first glance (today’s globalized harmonization) will turn out to be a culturally idiosyncratic blend of the global and the national upon closer inspection.

Therefore, the book starts out from the assumption that the linear progress “from national to global” emphasized in recent times is somewhat problematic. The motive for this linear interpretation is understandable yet often misleading, as William Pinar has observed: To escape (often unintended and unconscious) nationalism, researchers have recommended referring more to globalization as a phenomenon and introducing by that an epistemology that is likely to neglect the less intrusive notion of “international”: “It is a question contextualized in our national cultures, in the political present, in cultural questions institutionalized in academic disciplines and educational institutions. It is a question that calls upon us to critique our own national cultures” (Pinar, 2003, p. 3).

When one observes the difference between curriculum policy and curriculum research, it is easy to underline Pinar’s epistemological argument in favor of “international” over “global,” and history shows why. This book will collect case studies underlining this analysis. It aims at understanding the development of the school and, with it, the curricula as idiosyncratic processes that result from complex negotiations between the global and the national.

This idea was also the general basis of a large 3-year research project funded by the National Research Fund in Luxembourg, the results of which suggest a better and more sophisticated understanding of the school (and its curriculum) as a culturally and historically grown system. The results of this research project were presented at an international conference at the University of Luxembourg and contrasted to findings of similar research conducted in other parts of the world, foremost Switzerland. Later, scholars with similar research agendas in other countries were invited to contribute to this overall topic. After thorough discussions and revisions, the examples drawn from the selected nation-states analyze differences and tensions within practices of policy, governance, and curriculum. By doing so, they offer new and improved ways of understanding the curriculum as a materialization of educational ideals that emerge out of adjustment to global trends and resistance against these trends. In the contexts of nationalism, cultural crises, and globalization, the comparative focus will help us to comprehend curricula as institutionalizations of the negotiation processes that emerge out of the tensions between national and global convictions and aspirations—processes in which the actual curricula are constructed, reformed, and adapted in idiosyncratic ways.

The book is divided into four parts. Part One, including this introduction and a chapter written jointly by Thomas S. Popkewitz, Yanmei Wu, and Catarina Silva Martins, deals with the theoretical background and the question of what it means to reconstruct the cultural idiosyncrasy of national school systems against the background of transnational or global developments and pressures. Part Two, “Fabricating the Nation: National and International Impacts on Schooling in the Long 19th Century,” will feature in-depth case studies from the long 19th century. Part Three, “The Internationalization of European Schooling in the Cold War,” will focus especially on the Cold War era, as many international institutions important for the area of education got their specific shape during that period; it includes case studies from Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, and Finland. Part Four will focus on more recent developments, with case studies from Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Russia, and China.

We wish to thank, first of all, the National Research Fund in Luxembourg, which supported both the research project for 3 years and the international conference at the end of the 3 years. The project allowed us to engage in detailed studies without losing sight of the overall context. We also wish to thank the University of Luxembourg for providing excellent research conditions during this time period and through that for allowing us to help set the new university in the heart of Europe—founded in 2003—on a global agenda. And, finally, we wish to thank all those people engaged in the research project, be it as active researchers (Peter Voss, Anne Rohstock, Catherina Schreiber, Ragnhild Barbu, Geert Thyssen), extern...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I The Global and the Local in the History of Education
• Part II Fabricating the Nation National and International Impacts on Schooling in the Long 19th Century
• Part III The Internationalization of European Schooling in the Cold War
• Part IV Recent Developments
• List of Contributors
• Index